NBA Postseason Best Bets (5/3)
Alex Christenson
The PGA Tour’s Florida swing has been tame this year. It seems everywhere the Tour goes, they run into a softer-than-usual course due to the lead-in weather. Add in relatively calm winds by Florida standards and you have the recipe for lower scores.
There is still one more chance for the Sunshine State to provide a tough test. It will come this week at Valspar Championship, played at Innisbrook Resort’s Copperehead Course in the Tampa Bay area.
Let’s break down the course characteristics and then see what pops off the page from a betting point of view.
Course Fit
This week’s course is the Copperhead Course at Innisbrook Resort. Over the last two weeks we’ve seen PGA National and TPC Sawgrass tease golfers with risk-reward holes that feature a lot of high-leverage shots.
Innisbrook still has some water in play but provides its toughness in other areas. With tight, tree-lined corridors, golfers find just 60 percent of fairways here on average. That is low especially when you factor in the less-than-driver options laid out on so many of the par 4s here. The fact there are five par 3s also takes driver out of hand more than usual.
Despite having way fewer blow-up holes compared to recent weeks, this course provides just as tough of a test, if not tougher. For example, 14 of the 18 holes played over par last year. There were just 23 eagles recorded by the entire field during the 2023 edition. So, there is a lot of potential to run into bogey trains but not a lot of relief holes to quickly get back those lost strokes.
So far we know it’s a less-than-driver course with tough scoring. Lastly, we look at the greens and see they are bermuda overseeded with poa triv. Looking for recent comps on that, you could check putting results at PGA West, TPC Scottsdale, or TPC Sawgrass.
What names pop off the page when looking at the key split stats (poa triv greens, hard courses, less-than-driver courses)? Here are the top 10 in the field when it comes to overall split stat performance compared to their baseline:
Daniel Berger
Seamus Power
Robby Shelton
Joel Dahmen
Justin Suh
Ben Griffin
Ben Martin
Luke Donald
Matt NeSmith
Gary Woodland
Donald plays a light schedule these days, but his track record here was always a great pointer toward the comp to Harbour Town. He has seven career podium finishes at Harbour Town. He is a past champ at Innisbrook and also has four other top 10s on his course resume. Both are less-than-driver layouts with tough-to-hit greens, where pars are your friend.
Head over to the splits stats page to see how the entire field stacks up in these categories.
Outright Odds
Here’s what the top of the board looks like on DraftKings Sportsbook:
Burns is the interesting name on the board for me. Without the two wins on his resume, he’s likely priced below Spieth but instead he’s ahead of both Spieth and JT this week.
Beyond the Winner
Outright bets provide the big payoffs in golf but finish-position bets are good for a more consistent stream of winning, bridging the gap between outright wins.
Ben Griffin Top 20 Finish
Best available: +450 (Bet365)
Worst available: +360
As you may have noticed, Griffin shows up on the splits list from above. His performance metrics are nearly 20 percent better when playing similar courses to Innisbrook, relative to his baseline stats.
The less-than-driver nature of this course is what really stands out to me. Looking at Griffin’s stat profile over on FTN’s PGA Course Fit page, we see that he’s not accurate off the tee and not particularly long either. He does everything else well, though, so a course like Innisbrook could be a good spot for that second-shot style of golf to shine. A promising bonus is seeing that in his tournament debut he actually gained strokes off-the-tee while being longer and more accurate than the field. That could have been a “lucky” week or it could mean the course fits his eye a bit more than usual.
His less-than-driver stats confirm the odds value as his top-20 rate over the last two years on less-than-driver courses is 28% (5 of 18) which would equate to a +257 price, much lower than the +450 we are getting at Bet365.
Keep an eye on the PGA bet tracker for more plays. Hop in the Discord to get those bet alerts.
